Mission and Vision

Mission

The Student Global AIDS Campaign (SGAC) is a US-based network of student and youth organizations, including HIV+ youth, committed to the global fight against AIDS. SGAC seeks to mobilize a diverse student movement, in partnership with students internationally, to make claims upon governments, corporations, and civil society through informed political advocacy and direct action. SGAC demands sufficient resources, effective prevention, and guaranteed access to AIDS treatment and care as a matter of moral urgency.

Vision

The Student Global AIDS Campaign envisions a world in which AIDS is no longer a death sentence; in which economics and geography do not determine access to life-saving drugs; and where every woman, man and child has the knowledge, means and rights to protect themselves from infection. To achieve such a world, we must remake our institutions to reflect a shared commitment to our common humanity. We must confront the underlying causes and drivers of the AIDS pandemic: poverty, inequalities along the axis of race, gender, and class, sexual stigmas, and a politics of fatigue that allows us to deny our responsibilities to and for each other.

Our global economy must be matched by a global conscience. We have the tools to fight AIDS; we must now summon the will to use these tools. SGAC will not accept excuses for inaction; we will not accept false barriers that divide us; we will not accept the myth that any of us are powerless. Through the formation of a global youth movement united in solidarity and through the power of communication, we pledge ourselves to the struggle against AIDS – a struggle by its nature against apathy, against indifference, against injustice of all kinds. Together, we will work to expose a glitch in the matrix – to lay bare the precise mechanisms through which the poor and marginalized are rendered vulnerable to the ravages of AIDS while those with power wallow in surfeit. By seeking to echo and amplify the voices of those disproportionately affected by the pandemic and by engaging the political process through direct action, we will rise to the challenge of fighting aids. AIDS is the crisis of our generation and we will be defined by our response to it. We will end this pandemic.